Implementing Bulletproof Systems to Build a Scalable, High-Performance Team
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A COO of a mid-sized couple hundred million dollar company is going to be struggling with areas too, right? So our job is to always grow people. The COO's job is to grow people too. And I always try to let them know that their to-do list does not have their name on it. It's stuff that needs to get done. And their job is to delegate everything on their list to other people.

and spend their time growing those people's skills and confidence and connections. But anytime a COO or a leader is physically doing work, whether it's replying to emails, prepping for a meeting, doing physical phone calls, any work that we're doing is delaying us from growing our team. And

And the mental block we often get stuck in is, well, I don't have anybody to delegate it to. No, you just don't have the skills around delegation yet. You probably don't have good coaching skills. You're probably not skilled up on situational leadership. You're probably not great at running one-on-one meetings. But if we could give you the competence in those and the confidence to delegate more and grow people, you would.

Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello.

Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299. And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode.

Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.

All right, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today's extra special, I've got Cameron Herald here, and this guy knows quite a bit about home service and business. I've got a lot to talk to you about, Cameron. You're an expert in leadership development, corporate training, management consulting, based in Vancouver, Canada, founder of the COO Alliance, keynote speaker, investor, and

And you've done too much to even mention, but Double Double, Vivid Vision are some of the books you've written. You want to just start the audience. Most people know who you are, but just give a little for what you've done in the past where you're headed. Sure. So I was actually raised to be an entrepreneur. My dad and grandparents were both entrepreneurs, both sets of grandparents, and they groomed my brother, my sister and myself to be entrepreneurs.

When I was 20 years old, I owned my first real business. I had 12 full-time employees and I was in the home services space. I was painting houses. And that first summer in four months, I painted 78 houses with my 12 employees and I

Thought, well, I guess I have a house painting business. I got to be a part of a group called College Pro Painters, which went on to become the largest residential house painting company on the planet. It was a franchisor. I became part of the head office of the franchisor and was in charge of recruiting and hiring and training franchisees in my early 20s. So I was doing that at a young age in the home services space.

helped open up the West Coast of the United States for College Pro. And when I left, we were doing 9,000 hires a year, 800 franchisees and 8,000 painters every year. And then we do 64 million in house painting in the summer months. So I got, I really cut my teeth in that space. Then I went on and did an auto body chain. I was a minority partner in what became Gerber Auto Collision in the US, Boyd Auto Body in Canada. It's the largest collision repair chain in the world.

We took that from seven locations to when I joined to 65 and then took the company public. I exited and was hired as president of a private currency company that we built and sold. Then I joined my best friend back in the home services space. My parents were disappointed in me. I was going from building a technology company that we'd sold to

to becoming a junk man. And I joined my best friend, Brian, to take a company called the Rubbish Boys and professionalize the brand and turn them into what is now known as 1-800-GOT-JUNK. We went from 2 million to 106 million in revenue in six years.

3,000 employees system-wide, 330 cities. It's now a $750 million top-line revenue company. But I left there 17 years ago. So I'd done those things before I turned 45. And now for the last 17 or 42, the last 17 years, I've been traveling all over the world and coaching CEOs of companies in 28 countries. So that's some of my data points. So what do you focus on, CEOs or COOs?

A little bit of both. I started with the CEO and what we identified was the CEO needs to know what has to happen. The COO has to know how to make it happen.

It's almost like if you're building a home, the homeowner has to know what we want to build. The general contractor has to know how to build it. And I think for the longest time, I was teaching the wrong people. I was teaching the CEO how to grow their company. And often they would get it, but then they needed me to teach somebody else or they were frustrated with the implementation of the execution.

Gina Wickman came up with that idea, the visionary and integrator, and it really illustrated or kind of highlighted the point that entrepreneurs have to know what has to happen. And then, you know, the second in command and their leadership team have to be able to execute.

So I started working closer with the COO. You and I are both friends with Joe Polish from the Genius Network. I was a member of that for eight years and I was sitting at one of his events one day and it dawned on me that there was really no connection network for second in commands. There was lots of groups for entrepreneurs.

Vistage and EO and franchisors and all kinds of places for entrepreneurs to share with each other. And then there were groups for finance people and marketers and everybody else, but there was no network for that second in command. So we started the COO Alliance and we now have a global network of COOs from 17 countries that share resources and connections and competence with each other. That's a big deal. I mean, I think the COO is a massive undertaking. I think

Most home service businesses are missing the financial side as well, the CFO. Yeah. Well, and let's even not call it the CFO and COO. Let's call it the head of finance and the head of operations, because maybe it's a director of finance and a director of operations you need, or maybe it's a director of operations and a VP of finance. I think people often put a title on something too early instead of identifying what do you need to get done?

What are you willing to pay for that stuff to get done? And then what other kind of value do you want from the person who's doing that work? Do you want strategic insight? Do you want P&L responsibility? Do you want somebody with so much autonomy that they already know what to do? Or do you want to delegate to them and have them doing it? And based on those things, you can kind of put a title on it. Yeah, you know, right now I had a conversation with Luke, who you know is my COO. And I took it on my house.

And while he came to my house and, um, I said, here's my plan. This is the vision. This is the next 18 months. And, uh, you're the bottleneck. I said, you've got 12 direct reports. You're micromanaging them. So what that means to me is you're the smartest one in the room for most of them. And I never put you on a hiring freeze. You don't have an assistant. I said, so we've got to make a decision here of the next best move. And, um,

You know, Luke is very, very good at creating revenue. And I would say he's created everything I put him in. He's one of the smartest guys I know. Sure. He can do anything. But team building is tough when you're on a rocket ship. And when you're doing work.

Yeah, well, look, if you're the smartest guy in the room most of the time, I've really prided myself on not trying to be that guy. Well, yeah, so look, so here's where the beauty is, you identified an opportunity to grow someone. And regardless of how high skilled or confident any of our direct reports are, there's always a chance to give them more and delegate and grow them more, right? I was sitting with the CEO of Sprint, who I was coaching for 18 months, Marcelo Claray, and his second command, Jamie Jones.

sitting in Marcelo's office, the 82nd largest company in the United States. And he was asking me about people stuff, issues in the people side of the business. You get like when CEOs of Sprint are still struggling with people issues. Well, of course, a COO of a mid-size couple hundred million dollar company is going to be struggling with areas too, right? So our job is to always grow people. The COO's job is to grow people too. And I always try to let them know that their to-do list does not have their name on it.

It's stuff that needs to get done and their job is to delegate everything on their list to other people and spend their time growing those people's skills and confidence and connections. But anytime a COO or a leader is physically doing work, whether it's replying to emails, prepping for a meeting, doing physical phone calls, any work that we're doing is delaying us from growing our team.

And the mental block we often get stuck in is, well, I don't have anybody to delegate it to. No, you just don't have the skills around delegation yet. You probably don't have good coaching skills. You're probably not skilled up on situational leadership. You're probably not great at running one-on-one meetings. But if we could give you the competence in those and the confidence to delegate more and grow people, you would.

Entrepreneurs tend to be better at that. They already know that they suck at something. It's their company, so they can write the rules. As long as they have the cash to cover it, they make that decision. COOs often get blocked in that space. And it's our job as the CEO to help them unblock, right? To help free them up to do that stuff. And let them know that the more you delegate and the more you grow people, the more indispensable you're becoming. It's not like you're going to be out of a job. We'll find more to delegate to you. We'll buy three more companies.

Oh, yeah. I mean, nobody like, trust me, I will find more. I mean, it's so funny because... You're like a magnet for more with the growth you're going through. It's amazing. I always tell people, you might outwork me. It's probably not true. I'll outdelegate you. I mean... You also, I think, are going to outlearn your team, which is an opportunity as well as how do we get your team, right? And this is true for anybody listening. The leader can't be the only one learning.

When we built 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I made sure that everyone on our leadership team had a formal mentor. And I made sure everyone on our leadership team was a part of an industry or a group growing their skills. I joined Strategic Coach in 2002.

23 years ago, I got into Strategic Coach for my first three years with them. And I had the second in command at Starbucks mentoring me on a monthly basis and quarterly in person. So when you can get that kind of a focus around leadership, not because someone's broken, but because we're going to continue to grow and we need to keep getting better. Like every year, this company is the biggest thing we've ever built. And if we double next year, your skills have got to be doubled.

So it's like the high-performance athletes. But what happens in so many entrepreneurial companies is the entrepreneur learns, the entrepreneur reads books, the entrepreneur listens to podcasts, the entrepreneur has a coach, and they forget about growing all their people. I agree with that. I was sitting with Ken Goodrich, the CEO of Gettle, and he sat in our boardroom with me several years ago, and he looks at me, and he goes, Tommy, how many books are you reading a week now? I go, typically two.

He goes, how many podcasts do you do? I'm like typically three to four a week. He goes, how many events do you go to? I'm like typically 20 a year. He goes, you call me up at midnight with ideas. He goes, you are dedicating, you're sleeping and working at least 50 to 60 hours and you're putting another 30 a week into yourself. How many coaches do you have? I said at the time I had five. He goes, my best advice is see all these guys in this room if they don't step up to at least give themselves 15 hours a week.

unfortunately, you're going to be growing too fast and you're going to have to fire them. Or you could invest in them or they could choose to invest in themselves. And he said, he called me up later that day and said, was I a little harsh?

And I was like, kind of, but he was right because I'd go do all these things on the road and I'd learn and I'd go do shop tours and I'd ask questions and I'd read books and I'd get to know the author and I'd go behind the stage and I got more access over time. And once I started bringing them with me and giving them access and they were like, now I see what you're excited about. Right. Start learning and they start growing. Yeah.

And I started way too late. And that's, you know, we had to reconfigure the org chart.

Yeah, you noticed something and he gave you a heads up on something. And it's that any midsize or senior manager can only go through two doubles in the organization before the organization has outgrown their skills. So if you're a $5 million company and you go to 10, that head of whatever can still be the head of whatever. When you get to 20, they can still be the head of whatever. When you get to 40, it's eight times bigger than when they started. They're probably out of a job unless they can continue to grow their skills and their confidence and their connections.

But as leadership team members, we're often in the midsize companies. We don't have that kind of track towards it or the culture internally feels like, oh, if I'm getting coached, I'm broken. No, every best athlete in the world has got a coach. Like they're still getting coached because like everyone at the Olympics today has got a coach. Why do we have such a negative mentality around growth? Right. And I think you also dovetailed into one other really key point, which was hire people that are already self-driven learners.

Right. It's too it's too hard to take somebody who doesn't like to learn and make them learn. So we need to actually front load that stuff and put it into our normal hiring and interviewing process and already look to hire people who learn. My 21 year old son right now is reading Think and Grow Rich for the third time and he's underlining it. He goes, I'm studying it.

that's a self-driven learner. So you got to look for all those people at any age and bring those people into the organization and then plug them into our learning track. And then they'll devour the content we put in front of them. Yeah, that's a great point. I've got a lot of notes already. I was listening to a little speech by Jeff Bezos and he said, look, my job as CEO of this company is to maintain the vision. The people underneath me make decisions based on my vision.

And he's obsessed with the client, obviously, the client perspective of how does the client win? How does the client win? But, you know, how we get to the vision, there's I always say there's 10 ways to the top of the mountain. There's a lot of ways to get there. I think there's three CEOs. There's one with the finance background, like Parker and Sons is doing 280 million in Phoenix.

He was an accountant. He was a CPA. And then there's the COO, CEO, really strong operations. And then there's me, more of a CMO. I'm a marketing. I love marketing. It's funny, Joe Paul is saying I love marketing. I absolutely am like, but now I'm starting to learn, probably these last two years, is how do I market better for the right people? Because when the right people are there, our clients win.

So there's a subtlety around what you just said that I want to talk about. And I think I've talked about it like once or twice in 25 years publicly, but I've talked to lots of people privately about this.

Often marketers or entrepreneurs that aren't strong in marketing think that they need to get more of the clients they already have because our marketing is bringing us those people. Often our marketing is bringing us the wrong people, but we're marketing in a place where those people tend to be. And if we would move our marketing or move our messaging to where our target market is, so it's all about understanding who is our target client. Our target client doesn't necessarily have to be who we have today.

One of my big frustration points with Sprint was they kept saying that every year we kept getting lower and lower demographic people coming into our locations. And every year we kept getting all these people that are getting denied for loans. I'm like, it's because you're advertising on television. Anybody middle class and upper class left TV 20 years ago. It's like you're hitting people with the digital yellow pages. But they didn't realize that they were spending so much of their marketing on television ads and all of their clients had moved to digital.

So if they would start spending their marketing, like another example for you in the home services space, you probably know this because you're an entrepreneur and you're marketing and you're savvy. But if you're a, I don't know, like a landscaping company or a house painting company or, you know, even a roofing company, who's making the decision? The housewife or the husband? The wife.

And every guy thinks he's making the decision. But the housewife is saying, who's coming onto my property? The housewife is saying, I don't care how strong their skills are. I don't want those people coming onto my property, which means your branding, your website, your marketing, your messaging should all be done by female copywriters, female marketers, female branding. Why is our marketing dedicated to a male written by guys, copy from guys, when guys aren't our audience?

Men are not hairy versions of women. So when I walked into 1-800-GOT-JUNK, I'd learned this at College Pro Painters. Our job is to connect with the wife because she's making the decision, but let the husband pretend he's making the decision. At 1-800-GOT-JUNK, we would go and flirt with the housewife. We'd make a big deal about how it's so easy to get rid of all the junk your lazy husband can't get rid of, and she'd laugh about it. Meanwhile, the guy's like, yeah, I got the house cleaned. You did fuck all. We came in and cleaned your house. You just pointed at it. We did all the work.

but we made sure that we taught our, so the guys that we hired to do junk removal weren't garbage men. We hired fraternity boys and we put them in a golf shirt and we trained them how to build a connection with a housewife and talk about her kids and her garden and the first picture you see in the hallway. We would train them around that stuff. And if you go to our websites today, like 1-800-GOT-JUNK or Shack Shine or like, it's so clearly focused on the female demographic. And Mark. How important is, um,

Oh, and here's the last point on that. Not only is she making her decision at her house, she's making her parents' decision on their home, and she's making his parents' decision on their home because she's taking care of all the seniors in the family. She's making five-sixths of all of the adult buying decisions over 40 years old are being made by women. You're absolutely right. We talk about this all the time. One of the things that I really started to realize is I'm going after male technicians typically,

but I got to get the wives talking because all the people I want already have careers. They're not on indeed glass door monsters and recruiter career builder. Yeah. They already got good careers. So if I get the wives talking about how now they're spending more time with the kids are coming home with more energy. I got the good him going to church again. This is a company you could get behind. All of a sudden she's still going to him. Hey, asshole, you need to go work for these guys. So when I'm talking about recruiting, I,

And I don't look at recruiting like most people do. Recruiting is not having a job fair. Recruiting is going and getting who your avatar is.

And it's almost building where demand doesn't exist. It's also blowing away your current employees. Like my number one metric for every company I've ever built is my employee net promoter score. The second most important metric is my customer net promoter score. My third is my profit in dollars. My fourth is revenue. And I can predict how fast a company can scale by how fast I can grow their employee net promoter score. If you can get employee NPS over positive 90%, it's game over, you win.

But most people are so focused on the customer or profit or growth that our employees feel not loved and they feel burned out. Well, that's another thing why we have a dream manager. Right. Matthew Kelly's book is spectacular. It is. It really is. We had one in 2001 at 1-800-GOT-JUNK. We had our dream board, our 101 dream goals. We were obsessed about that book. It was great.

I'm obsessed with it today. And I'm just adding a bunch of technology. Like everybody should have a vision board in the company. Everybody should understand Dave Ramsey's simple rules. We brought John, we brought John Asteroff who popularized the vision board up to our office in Vancouver to make a meet with our employees. You get it.

Well, yeah. Well, listen, I think no matter how much I do, I still feel like I got so much room to grow. Like I never feel arrived. I never feel like I'm the smartest guy in the room. I tell this story all the time, but years and years ago, I took 90 minutes to talk to a small garage door company that just needed help. Talk to this guy, told him everything I knew, told him what companies to go to, how to get his call center dialed in. And he goes, why did you do this? I said, well, a lot of people took the time to do it for me. He goes, well,

You probably might know this, but I went on the store locator for Chamberlain, which is 70% of the market share of the openers. And you buy more than I do.

He goes, you're not on the store locator. I go, huh? That kind of pisses me off. Thank you for letting me know. I made a phone call the next day. They got me on the top of the store locator, 35 extra calls per day back then. Right. Because I took the time and I helped people. Without an ask. Yeah. Without anything in return. And you know, Ziegler said, you're going to have anything you want in life. If you help have enough people get what they want. This was our friend, John ruling, man.

So this is the key. And what most entrepreneurs don't get, and you do, is that if we care about our employees, if we care about their personal lives, if we care about their dreams, if we care about their insecurities, if we care so much about them as humans...

more than anyone in their life cares about them as humans. They'll care about our company way more than anything else. But as soon as we focus on the company, they just don't feel as loved. The second part of that is an entrepreneur like you who drives, drives, drives,

There's only two of you. You either drive, drive, drive, and you burn everybody out, or you drive, drive, drive, and you say thank you, and you praise people, and you celebrate the wins, and you celebrate the core values, and you celebrate projects getting completed. And that's the key is to always be grateful and celebrate and thanks and do shout outs, very similar to what we do with our spouse. You can't get through one fight with your spouse unless you've got months of I love yous and praise and thank you and cuddle time. And it's all the little things that add up that allow us to get through that next big fight.

With our employees, the fight is another goal, another project, fix this, move that, go faster. But if we build off of thank you and great job and you did an awesome job living this and celebrating the wins in front of everybody, if entrepreneurs would spend more time on that, they'd win. Yeah. And it's hard. Overwhelming because I feel like some of the people that were really close to me missed the dinners and they missed that time. I'm actually building a tool

And I never found a payroll system I like, so I had to build my own. But it's a simple way for me to say, happy birthday, happy birthday to your kids, happy anniversary, included with business intelligence that I know of. The crew had their best day. The market had their best day. You had your personal best day. Or you had your worst day. Do you know that when there's only been four, maybe now five CEOs of Starbucks in 45 years, 50 years,

One of the days, Howard Behar was the CEO at the time, and Howard would spend two hours every single Friday handwriting thank you notes to people in stores inside the 13,000 stores at Starbucks. I met him. Yeah, he's amazing. Incredible. So my mentor was being groomed as the COO at Starbucks, and he showed me their system. Every Friday, Howard's desk would have a stack of thank you notes, a stack of envelopes, and a spreadsheet.

And the spreadsheet would say, store number 207, Frappuccino record, Kansas City. You'd be like, hey, store number 207, congrats on setting the Frappuccino record in Kansas City. Looking forward to seeing you when I'm there this August. Howard, boom. Kelly, congrats on your seventh year. So he didn't know who to send anything to, but the system showed him. But this is the CEO of one of the biggest companies in the world spending two hours every Friday handwriting thank you notes. Entrepreneurs that say thank you to somebody once a quarter are missing the point.

As are COOs, right? COOs have to overpraise and over-choke. It's the whole one-minute manager by Ken Blanchard, which I'm sure you've read, right? It's praise for success. Catch them doing something right. But we need to build the systems in place to ensure that so that we don't forget when we're busy and when we're growing. And that comes along with one of the biggest things I've realized about a lot of the leadership teams I've been involved in. So a great...

executive assistant will actually, and possibly even all the way up to a chief of staff, will allow you to buy back so much time. And as simple little things as email. But most people don't understand you got to take two steps backward. They're going to make mistakes. You didn't put... So, you know, Dan Martell calls it the camcorder. I call it the Zoom method. I was with Dan yesterday. I love Dan. I mean, I learned a lot from him. I'm going to learn a lot from you. I'm glad we got to do this because...

you make me feel like I got so much more to learn, which is how I always want to feel. Inspiring. What would you say

Well, there's a lot I want to do on PAC there, but I got another burning question because there's so many different leadership. Everybody I know. Let me kind of complete that thought, I think. So if an assistant can help get a bunch of stuff off your plate, that's minimum wage job, stuff you're not good at, stuff that drains you of energy to free you up as a leader, to go spend time with people and say thank you and praise them. Fuck, your job just got super easy and you're growing the confidence and skills of your people.

Like that's the stuff that really moves the business forward. Not all the busy work that we're doing. Jim Collins talks about working on the critical few things versus the important many. The critical few things are praising people, growing people, showing gratitude, communicating the vision and the culture, and then letting them do their job.

Yeah. And, you know, here's one thing that I had a breakthrough the other day with my buddy Chad Peterman on a podcast. And he said, you know, Tommy, I find myself that when I micromanage people, they're not the right people. A great person should be able to go do the research, bring you back three options, pick the best one and show you why it's best to do for the company. And I find sometimes that leaders pick people that are not as qualified as them because they feel like either they're

Their job's in danger or they just got this tough guy or tough gal mentality of like, this person's going to run circles around me. I'm a little bit like worried that they might take my job. And that's just, it's just, it's out of fear. And I don't really understand where that comes from, but it does happen.

Yeah, so that's a confidence thing and an imposter syndrome thing that we can work with our leadership team on to help them feel good about that. But the second part of that is often what happens is they build a permissive culture by accident that they're not anticipating. And they create this environment where people feel like they have to come to them for opinions or for ideas. Give an example. I was talking to our coaching CEO the other day and he said, you know, my leadership team

This one woman keeps coming to me every week saying, do you know how to do this? I keep trying to have an open door policy for her and help her. I'm like, well, what are you saying? It was like, I walk her through stuff. I'm like, stop. What she needs is help on thinking.

She doesn't need the answer that you're going to give her what she needs from you. The next time she comes and says, Hey, do you have two minutes? I have a question. You go, actually, I have open hours, like an hour at three o'clock and another hour tomorrow at two. Why don't you come back during that time? When she comes back at three in your office hours, you say, so what do you want to think about? Well, I'm thinking about this. What do you think? Well, what do you think? Yeah, I haven't thought about it. Go away and think about it. Come back and tell me what you thought.

And then when she comes back and says what you thought, just say, well, then go do it. Or just say, as long as it lives within the core values, it lives within your job description, you're willing to live by the sword and die by the sword, and you've got budgetary approval for it, go do it. But don't ask me. But our job as leaders is to grow their skills and confidence to do that and stop giving them the answers, stop even giving them the time, and stop doing their thinking for them.

Yeah, that's, that's, it's a hard one for everybody in the company. You know, that's one thing though, is like, I find when people, you ask them the right questions and they're presenting back to you, it's like, and they can speak out loud and they're like, I think I got my answer. Yeah. Well,

really didn't think through it. Right. The other danger part is when the CEO or the leader speaks first. I always like the leader to speak last. The most senior person in the room should always speak last because we sway their opinions and ideas. Our job is to get them to share their ideas so that we can go, that's amazing, which raises their confidence. Getting them to share ideas gives them the ability to be strategic and to think, gives them the confidence. And then when we

are ready to speak. We go, actually, you know what? I had three things to share. Kelly got one, Mark got one. The other one's kind of stupid based on what I hear. I got nothing. That's- You know, it's funny. I love that notion. I tell people never, ever, ever tell me no. Because I say, Cameron, if I gave you $100 million and a thousand badass Navy SEAL people to get this done, could you get it done? And you go, well, yeah, $100 million and the right staff.

So what was the deal with the entire estate building in 420 days? So that's the deal is like, I don't really want to say it can't be done because I just had this conversation with my VP of marketing. I said, tell me everything you could hit in the next 90 days. These are a lot of projects.

But I need you to tell me when you're going to hit the finish line and on my steps of delegation, here's why it needs to get done. Here's when it needs to get done. Here's the checkup days. And there's eight steps and they got to sign off on it. And the deal is, and I'm not perfect at this, by the way, I'm a work in progress, but

We were going through this and I'm just like, he's like, what are you going to do about all these other projects? I'm like, I'm going to get them all done. He goes, how? I'm like, I've got resources. I'm like, I could actually hire people. We don't always need to bring on employees to do all the work. Right. It's done faster. By the way, every early stage manager or mid-level manager, like new managers or...

you know, director level, their solution to every problem tends to be hire more people. So Parkinson's loss is that work expands to fill the space that we give it. No budget, they'll spend more. And if, and if you're the ability to hire people, they won't think critically or think differently or say no. So the key is to train managers on how to say no, or how to say not now, or how to optimize the work or how to automate the work

But the budget is no for hiring. And if you're going to hire somebody for like 80 grand a year or 100 grand a year, no one, you for sure, would never go and spend 80 grand on a marketing decision with a one-minute decision. Why would anybody allow us to make an $80,000 hiring decision with a one-minute decision?

I want your you better pitch me for 30 minutes on the upside, on the cost, on what the results are going to be, on how much gross margin this person is going to generate, on how much autonomy, where you're going to get them. Like you better sell me for 30 minutes on making an $80,000 decision. And if you haven't done your prep on that, the answer is no.

Most managers won't even try to pitch me on hiring somebody until they absolutely need it and they can prove the case. But that's a skill set that we need to build inside of our company is the ability to say no, the ability to prove ROI. It's kind of like Dan Sullivan's decision filter, his impact filter. But I add a layer to that, which is what's the ROI? What are the three inputs in terms of people, cost, and money? And how does it grow our employee net promoter score, customer net promoter score, profit, or revenue?

because otherwise every idea sounds like a good idea yeah i know one of the funny things is a lot of people come to me and they're like you're gonna kill me they come with a big mistake and they're like we've been paying rent that are that lease that we moved out of in reno for the last six months and i'm like good and they're like what do you mean good i'm like we're not gonna pay it next month are we right glad we stopped at six about seven and

That means we're going to be more profitable next month. And that means we're creating an SOP to make sure that never happens again, right? I don't mind when people screw up. I'm not going to screw up again. Well, that's the Michael Gerber mentality from the E-Myth Revisited. It's people don't fail, systems fail. So when we have a problem, go, great, thanks for showing me of the problem. Thanks for having the confidence to come in and say we have a problem and know you're not going to get shit for it. What's the missing system or broken system that we can fix or put in place to ensure this never happens again? Right.

We're good to go, right? And sometimes it could be a hiring system. You could all go all the way back first principles. And yeah, maybe we hired the wrong person because they just didn't follow the systems that were clearly documented and amazing. You know, Richard Branson has this mentality that Dan Martell always talks about that he goes out and finds the best number two at a company and makes him the CEO. I don't know. And, you know, I'm not trying to let my pride get in the way, but I feel like a lot of people...

And I'm not saying I'm the only visionary in the world because God knows that's not true. But I usually paint the vision and reverse engineer how to get there with KPIs. Yeah, I would hire a president and COO and not say I'm hiring a CEO. I would stay CEO, vision chairman, and I would hire a COO and like a president COO to run it. Because you're right. Most good COOs, presidents aren't good visionary culture people. They can execute on that plan.

The one I've seen do it best though is Morten Lund, who is one of the founders of Skype and the original investor in Skype. He's got 86 companies up and running. And all he does is start the company, put the team and plan and money in place. And then he walks away with whatever equity he's got at that point. But he's literally kind of,

walking away from the business completely. I think if you care about it at all, I would hire a president COO versus appointing a CEO. Because as soon as you appoint CEO, you really got to stay as chairman and board role and stay out of the day-to-day, stay out of the vision. You can't get involved. And most aren't willing to do that. Yeah, that's interesting because my plan was always go through the next turn and then find the next, move to a chairman or a co-CEO.

But maintain the vision. But the vision is to become a $15 billion company by getting to $500 million of EBITDA, getting a 30X with an IPO. And if you can get that vision into a vivid vision, like a four or five page description of your company where you really describe what the whole company looks like, acts like, and feels like, then the CEO can go and execute on that for three years. But if you give them that full framework, that vivid vision framework, which is where most companies miss,

When you get that locked and loaded five-page description of every single aspect of your company three years in the future, any great president, CEO can execute it against that vision. And that allows you to go off and maybe think strategy, maybe just do industry stuff, and maybe just focus on the next parts of growing other parts of the empire portfolio.

Yeah, I don't think a guy like me, there's a lot of people that are like, I made it. They think they're at the top of the mountain. Gina Whitman sold a big part of EOS. And sitting there in his 50s, he said, I was crushed. I just sold my baby. Yeah. You would think I got this pot of gold. Of course, you're giving up cash flow now. But I, you know, I think both are important.

And he said that's why he wrote the book Shine recently. Right. And you look at that and you go, there's a lot of people that sell a business and they say, man, I got the money. And they go spend a couple of weeks in Hawaii or Mexico. And then they're like, shit.

Now what? I lost my, almost like a man's search for meaning or something. Yeah, well, it is very similar to man's search for meaning. Viktor Frankl, here's the problem, and it's a very North American, even more American problem than even North American, because North America includes all of Central America and Canada. And this is so not true of Central America, so not true of Mexico, much less true in Canada, but truer.

Too many North American entrepreneurs don't have any fucking hobbies and connection with their spouse and activities with their kids and bucket lists. And they've lost sight of all the stuff that matters. I got news for everybody. None of this shit matters. Like we just lost a good friend of ours, John Rulon, 54 hours ago. And he's got four young girls under 15 years old and a wife. And he's got hobbies and passions and friends. John was building a great company, but it wasn't his reason for being.

I don't know what Gino's hobbies were. I know what Gino's obsession was EOS, but, and I'm not speaking to exactly what it was, but I can tell you for sure in the last three years, my wife and I have been to 54 countries.

We sold our home in Scottsdale in Arcadia, sold our home in Canada, sold our cars, sold all of our furniture. We've been chasing down bucket list after bucket list. And so if when I ever sold a company, I'm fine because I got 75 other hobbies I want to be spending time with. And I think more entrepreneurs need to remember that they need to have a better rounded life.

The whole like this is my hobby. Well, then I don't want to hear about your hobby. Nobody wants to hear a lawyer talk about being a lawyer or a dentist talk about being a dentist or an accountant talk about being an accountant. So even if they love their industry, that's not your hobby. And I think entrepreneurs need to remember to reconnect with our hobbies, find new hobbies, do our own dream manager for ourselves, create our own bucket list, share your bucket list.

And then you can build your company, sell your company, and you've got 75 other things that you're going to fill your time with. Because at the end of the day, we're going to all end up as kebabs. We're just going to end up dead as meat on a stick. Well, my mom said, when's enough enough? And I met with Gary Vaynerchuk. And I said, you know, Gary, the weird thing about me is probably when a football player, a professional football player gets in a room and talks to his buddies about that tackle.

and that coach and that scrimmage. I talk about business. I mean, literally, that's probably the highlight. Like that is, I was talking to Damon John and I was like. But again, you're giving North American examples. You're giving American examples. I've spent 54 countries over three years spending time with billionaires in other countries. I sat with Richard Branson's son for two and a half days

sitting on a boat, just us, sitting with his wife, sitting, chatting about kids. Sam Branson never spoke about business at all. I'm sitting with the guys that build the Six Senses Resorts in Europe. They don't talk about business. They talk about their hobbies. They're so much more rounded and stuff. And when they're focused, they focus on work. So yeah, there's definitely examples of people out there that are business, business, business. But I tell you, it's an American issue much more than a global issue. And there's 192 countries out there

I'm sure you do have other hobbies. And again, I'm obsessed with business too. I listen to business podcasts all the time. When I'm in the gym, when I'm going for walks, I'm hiking, I'm listening to My First Million or the All In Summit or what the fuck, I'm always learning. But I'm also taking courses around sexuality, around polarity, around spirituality, around self-growth, on psychedelics. Like Joe Polish, I love all these other interests and I want to grow great companies. And I think we'll build better companies

If we have hobbies and other interests, because then we can get our employees to have hobbies and other interests. We can have this better, well-rounded culture of people that have hobbies and interests, and we can still drive hard on goals. But to think that this is like the only people that this is the most important thing for is the entrepreneur. It's not the other thousands or hundreds or dozens of employees that work for us. It never will be. No, you're absolutely right. And I think there's certain times where you just listen and you go,

You got to rethink things. I think there's a lot of people listening right now going, you know, I always, Cameron, one of the questions I typically ask on stage is said, everybody raised their hand that plans on selling in the next three years. And there's a few hands in an audience of a thousand. I say, what about five years? And there's a few more hands that go up, maybe a couple dozen. And I go, why? You guys got a 20 year plan.

And a lot of people go, why would I sell my business? And I go, well, I believe in equity incentive programs. I believe in profit sharing. I believe in profit units, depending on the structure of the company. You know, ESOPs could work out for certain people, but it doesn't make any money until the company trades. And I believe in taking chips off the table.

I love John Warlow when it comes to build a cell. It doesn't mean you have to sell, but everybody has this like long-term way too long, especially in this time of machine learning and AI. And I know those are buzzwords, but it's like, it's not going to be the same. We went from yellow book to Google. Now we're going to this massive change and, you know, go into autonomous cars and all this stuff. And I don't,

I just say, are you really living the journey or is the destination the spot that you want to start living? Because I'm enjoying the shit out of this. You know, right now we're going to Morgan Wallen tomorrow night. That's why I'm in Vegas. I got to be on some really cool podcasts today. We've got we're going to Bora Bora. We're building a dream house in Idaho. And the funny thing is, I want to share this with the people I work with because I look at them as co-workers, employees.

but, um, I don't know. I, I guess I know how to, I don't have kids yet. We don't have kids. And, uh,

I've used to burn in the candle, but I also get up at five. By the way, I've never been a morning guy until the last year. And kids, yeah, I co-authored The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs. And I wrote in that book with Hal Elrod that I've never been a morning person. So I feel like a fraud co-authoring The Miracle Morning for Entrepreneurs with him. There's something pretty cool about being able to build a great company and have hobbies. And I think if we can do that,

We'll build better teams and better people and better culture. I think we can get both, I guess, is where I'm going. We can still love our business and be obsessed with business and want to talk about it. There's a whole more rounded side of how we're going to impact our people and our teams if we do it, you know, like the dream manager talks about, right? Yeah. You know, I wanted to ask you a question about ADHD because I'm writing a book about it right now. And I personally think people are misdiagnosed.

Some people have, they're on the spectrum. But true, you know, they call it a deficit disorder. Yeah, it's a superpower for entrepreneurs. I'm clinically diagnosed as 17 of the 18 and clinically, I needed to be diagnosed. I was also 11 for 11 on bipolar disorder. And then I have a dyslexia issue called dyscalculia where I flip all my numbers around. And I was given an award by the International Dyslexia Association as an executive, a leader who

has severe learning disabilities. I even talking about, I struggle with it all again. And they gave it to one person a year. Bruce, Bruce Jenner got it one year. Barbara Corcoran got it one year. I got it in 2017. So I've overcome these disabilities and disorders. And one of the ways I overcame them was realizing they're a superpower. They're not a disorder. My ADD as an entrepreneur would prevent me from being a good lawyer or engineer or a doctor or a teacher, but I didn't want to do that.

As an entrepreneur, I see what's happening with the market, the economy, the time, my customers, the website, the data points, stuff jumps off the spreadsheet. And it's overwhelming because it's everywhere that I need to delegate it and pass it to other people. But I don't want to not see all that stuff. The key is how can I organize the stuff? How can I say no to the non-critical stuff? How can I say no to the busy work that I notice all the time, right? So it's learning systems, but it's also don't medicate yourself to get rid of your superpowers.

Yeah. And you'd be surprised. You give a guy with ADHD or woman with ADHD, you get them good, clean, you know, health. And this is where an EA comes in and they get you organized. They get your time management under control.

I think it is a superpower. Get them proper sleep and exercise, and they'll actually have a much calmer brain during the day too. Like just actually getting eight hours of sleep between 10 o'clock at night and eight in the morning, like nine hours in bed, eight hours of proper sleep, and actually getting some exercise, like not even going to the gym and cranking for, but like- Walk, walk, speed walk. Those two little things will actually massively counter the bad or negative sides of ADD or ADHD. Yeah.

And probably, you know, a glass of wine here and there, but not getting pissed drunk every night. I quit drinking 15 months ago because it wasn't, I still use psychedelics for growth and spiritual work. But yeah, for me, I was using a full bottle of wine every single night and it was a bad crutch for me. Now my good crutch, I can't like when you and I are done this call, you can see my calendar. I go to the gym. I'm like excited to get out the door and go do a workout because it decompresses me on a busy day. It's a reset for me.

I'm trying to get a minimum of 20,000 steps a day. And that's a lot. That means a lot in Arizona in the heat that you're in, right? You got to get up early. You got to do a late walk after you eat dinner. And you got to, yeah, definitely Arizona. It's easier in Europe because we walk everywhere without cars now. So we just like get up and walk all the time. Yeah, that's interesting. I like where this is going because it doesn't need to go about business. You know, I looked at Italy's life expectancy and you think a couple of things are growing their own food.

The quicker you take it off the root and eat it, the more nutritious it is. And they drink plenty of wine, eat plenty of pasta, but they're bending over, picking up their crops. They're usually, and not everybody, but there's villages. Their pasta is not as gluten problem as we have in North America. Their pasta is better wheat. It's softer wheat. It doesn't have the same issues that we have.

Yeah, they're healthier. Their portion sizes are better. They walk everywhere. But you know what else they do in Italy and Spain and Portugal and Europe? They don't work all night long.

They finish work and they go spend time with friends. They have lunch with friends. They don't eat lunch at their desk. They have dinner with friends. They hang out on weekends with friends. They have hobbies. They have activities. You ask anyone in Europe, what do you do? And they'll be like, oh, I like hiking or I'm surfing. You'd be like, oh no, I meant to make money. They're like, oh fuck. They don't have the what do you do question. It doesn't even exist over in Europe.

Because they don't give a shit what we do. They want to know who we are and what are you into and what are you excited about and what are you doing and who you're studying. I like that, but I've also been involved in a lot of different companies overseas. And I'm like, does anybody work? Does anybody, how many national holidays do you guys have? 40 a month? Like, is there an eight hour break again where no one's going to be able to serve you? And so I do think capitalism is the best

uh and i'm not saying that that's not important man that is so important i'm very impressed but but well hang on so let's let's do 1-800-GOT-JUNK as an example north american company vancouver-based 750 million in revenue this year we give every single employee five weeks paid vacation that includes their skip time plus all the government statutory holidays which are like the 12 holidays you normally get like christmas and easter and

whatever, Memorial Day and all that crap. So they get five weeks paid vacation. Brian sent me a note at the beginning of this summer, the CEO, and he goes, oh, I'm giving them all Friday afternoons off. I'm like, are you out of your mind? He goes, nobody wants to work Friday afternoon anyway. So all summer we're giving them Friday afternoon. I'm like, that's 13 Fridays, half days, that's six and a half more days on top of the five weeks. He goes, yeah, they love us. I'm like,

Fuck, you're right. And no one wants to do work at that time anyway. So he has a super happy employee base. They're all raving fans. Nobody quits. They're all super happy. They get their shit done so they can get out of the office or they figure out how to delegate. They set better expectations with customers. Why is that a bad thing? It's only a bad thing if you're a customer and you go to a market and you can't get anybody out there. The hardest part about home service is capacity planning, and you know this. Right, exactly.

I've got 60 guys, just technicians and installers training this month. They do. Then they, they, you run shifts. You can have night shift, morning shifts. Yeah. And hopefully you could attract those people. And then it's, you're, you're darn right. Like if I want to try, you know what we used to do? We used to geofence around our warehouse or, or a building. And now I'm like, no, we're, we're, we're,

We have our capacity issues here. Phoenix is a big market. Denver is a big market. Nashville is a big market. Like, let's geopend where we want. Let's go after it. We need somebody to run the later shifts, nights, and weekends.

So, so like, I think going again to the marketing side is like, someone's going to love this job with a nurse, with a wife that's a nurse or, or a flight attendant and be able to work. And then I'm getting really keen on this idea of working three or three days or four days, just working longer hours. Well, we were seven days a week. I had to fight tooth and nail to get the company to open Saturday. And then I had to push to open Sunday. Once they got it, it made sense. All of our customers were at home on Saturday and Sunday. They want us to do junk removal then.

Well, that's the best shift to work because both decision makers are there. And you get tips because they're both like, so all of a sudden, and so what we did is we just ran split shifts. We run longer days, like you figure it out, right? But you can still give your employees the better work environment. You can still, and it doesn't cost you anymore to give them five weeks vacation. And you charge them with figuring out what's the system to have coverage. What's the system to have a backup plan? What's the system so everybody's winning?

But what happens is the recruiting costs drop, your training costs drop, your retention goes up, word of mouth goes up. And now you're hiring all the best employees away from your competitors because they're only given two weeks vacation. You win. The government doesn't prevent us from running a better place and attracting better employees. And as soon as we flip that model, we win.

Let me ask you, what do you think, you've done this way longer than I've done it, and I've done colors, I've done Breyers-Miggs, I've done the five languages, the workplace, I've done, what's the other big one I've done? A disc, Colby. Disc assessment, then there's the Colby profiles. The profile we were doing.

For a while. Culture index, strength finders. Yeah, I've never found any one of them that's got a high correlation. Do you have any ones that you live, die, and breathe by that you feel like this is a great indicator of?

And obviously different roles, different things, leadership versus field workers versus warehouse versus call center, I guess. Yeah, I rarely use them as part of the interviewing process unless the interviewing process is really dialed around behavioral and strengths. I use the top grading system from Brad and Jeff Smart out of the book, Who Are Top Grading? So it's a really tightly dialed interviewing. What is that called?

Top grading was Jeff or was Brad smarts book. And then his son, Jeff wrote who they're the, it's the, I love who it's one of my favorite books. So if you follow those systems, then you can bring in some kind of predictive personality profile into the interview late stage, but don't use it as your reason for making a decision, learn it for understanding more and for being able to interview deeper. And

Most companies think that it's like, oh, the profile said this, so we'll hire them. I can show you lots of data points when it's wrong. Use the profile as a way to dig deeper and interview harder and ask better questions and do tighter reference checks around the personnel profile. Then it's good. The second time that I use personality profiles and I do one different one a year is with the leadership team. So as an example, for you and your leadership team, this year I'd have everybody do Colby.

Next year we'd have everyone do love languages. Like you just do a different personality profile every year of everyone on the leadership team to learn about each other more, to learn how to work with each other more, to learn about ourselves more. But that's like a learning leadership tool. So you get like a Steven sister to come in and run disc and everybody train everybody on disc and help you talk to each other disc and leave it alone for a year. That's cool.

Then do another one next year. It's all about learning and building. As leadership teams, we go through this forming, storming, norming, performing model. Another personality profile every year helps you go through to the next forming stage, the next performing stage. When you said you double-double,

And that you become kind of extinct because you can't run that business. Yeah. What does that person, how does that work? I'm just curious. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I had that discussion with Clayton Mask, who's also from Arizona, the founder of Infusionsoft. We were sitting at lunch together one day and I asked him about his growth around people and he agreed. His was double. He said they can only go through two doubles.

And then Ben Horowitz, who wrote The Hard Thing About Hard Things, said a mid-level manager can only go through one triple. They can't do the next triple. So you can go from 3 million to 9 million, but you can't go from 9 million to 81 million, right? It's too substantially different. So that's about the same, though. It's about three doubles.

What you have to do is have prediction around growth. And then you have to think about the new skills that people are going to need to manage that level of growth. So if we're hiring more, so it's looking at what's your org chart look like in three years, what your org chart look like in two years, what's it look like in 12 months?

reverse engineering it all. Even your project plans, like you guys are going into planning September, October for next year. By the end of October, you should know what your plan is for the year, what your budget is, what your staffing plan is for the next 12 months. And then you can sit down and do a skill assessment and say, does our team have the skills and the confidence to do all those projects? Do they need a mentor to plug in? Do they need some consultants to help them? Do they need a course to go through?

And then for us at the leadership team level, it's looking at what's on our plate every quarter. And are we always getting up leveled around that? The danger about reading a new book or two books every week is we're often reading stuff that is different from what we're focusing on. And if we can focus our learning around what we're working on now. So if you've got like a leadership team retreat in a month, you should be reading everything you can about leadership retreats.

If you're getting ready to launch your marketing plan for the year, you should be reading everything you can about marketing plans. And then don't read about marketing for another three or four months. I think leaders do a bad job with applying their learning to what they're focusing on right now. Well, I do. You know, I had a mentor and he's the biggest mentor I've ever had. His name's Al Levy. He wrote a seven power contractor, a seven power contractor. And I come in after I hired him and the guy was just OCD.

He's like, I want the phones off, sit down. And he goes, Tommy, stop. And listen, he's still around. I'm still very, very close with him. And I still confide in him a lot. But one day he told me and he, I reminded him of this story. He said, can I talk to you for a minute? And I said, sure, Al. And he comes in my office and I said, what's up? He said, I'm not sure if I want to work with you anymore. And I said, why not? What did I do wrong? He said, well,

You're learning too fast. He said, you're reading 20 books all the time and you're bringing in pages and ideas and great ideas, but you haven't even learned what I've taught you yet. So I'm going to have to tell you to stop learning. I hate to say this, but until you get these fundamentals down, we finish your manuals, your SOPs, we get these checklists dialed in and you're living, breathing these every day.

He goes, no more new ideas. And I find there's an information overload right now. Everybody's got their own opinion and ideas. There's obviously the tried and true ones, like, for example, setting goals and writing those down and reverse engineering them. But I found myself in this position where I said, sure, Al, you're right, because I do get a lot of ideas.

And he goes, well, listen, put them on the idea board. We got a top 100, top 30, top five. Don't action them right away. Yeah. And he said, I just really appreciate it if you focused on what I'm going to teach you. And I did. And it changed everything. But I know there's other mentors out there, man, that I'm glad he was the right one because he could have sent me back a decade if it was the wrong stuff.

Yeah, there's something that's really good about what he's talking about is that there's so much, as you mentioned, there's so much distraction and so much stuff coming at us. Even if it's not noise, let's say it's all really good quality stuff coming at us. It's not necessarily relevant to the critical few things we need to be working on right now. And it's almost like if we were building a home, if you're building your dream home,

And you keep coming in and talking to the contractor about putting in the cabinets and putting in the beautiful wolf stove. And where are the, he's like, dude, we're pouring the foundation. You're like, yeah, I don't want to talk about the counters. Like, no, we're just putting up the framing. Yeah. I want to talk about the counters. Like we haven't even put in the electrical and the plumbing yet. So there's a whole order of operations around what we need to focus on to build great companies, whether you're a small, medium size or even enterprise level. And if you don't focus on those critical few things, the rest becomes noise and a distraction and frustration to our team.

He was smart in giving you a system to keep all of your ideas. What drives most entrepreneurs crazy is no, don't tell me your idea. They have to because their hard drive's full. Their brain's like a hard drive. There's no space to keep all those ideas. We have to go, I love your idea. Let me put it here. Or even before I put it here, let me ask you five or six questions so I understand your idea even more. And I love your idea. After those five questions, I'll put it here and we'll revisit it in a quarter.

But it's, I get it. I like it. It's safe. And I even understand it more because you let me ask you five questions. For every entrepreneur, that system would be game changing. And then every quarter, go back and look at all the ideas and decide which ones to green light, which ones to continue on yellow and which ones to red light going. Yeah, it was a good idea last quarter. Now we can kill it. Well, that's what's interesting is if people knew how to communicate with me, they would say, great idea. Tell me more. It's on the docket. Would you agree that this is more important?

And what I would say is, let's really analyze this and let's see what the impact this would have. But what I would say is most of my ideas evolve around marketing. Typically, it's not going to say, how do we get an extra two points in the call center? Although that's a very KPI driven person. But, you know, you're so right that people, if they just would listen to entrepreneurs, acknowledge that and not roll their eyes.

And say, but have a case for it and say, we've talked about this. It's making it on the list. We've got a Trello board or a Monday board or a sauna board or whatever you like to communicate on. And just work through that. And I think the entrepreneurs that are mostly listening to this show,

You're going to need to learn how you need to be communicated with and at least put that on paper and then tell people and just know you were heard and know they were listened to. And sometimes it's a text. Sometimes it's an email. It could be anything. But if you're not even instructing people how you want to be heard, then you got to look in the mirror.

Right. Do the instructor manual to yourself, right? Like, can you imagine if Tommy Mello had the operating manual of Tommy Mello and if Luke had the operating manual of Luke? By the way, instead of just the impact of that project, I'm going to challenge you to take that to the next level because it's really easy to show what the impact will be. What I want to know is,

How will that impact increase our employee net promoter score? How will it make my customer net promoter score go up? How will it increase my growth margin or my profitability? And how will it grow revenue? So I want to know on those four things. And I want to know what are the three inputs we have? How much people, how much time, like days or weeks or months is going to take to do and how much money are we going to have to put into it? And what's the ROI?

Because it's easy for me to show you the impact, but if I don't show you that it's going to cost 71 days of people's time, you're like, you know what? Forget about that impact. Let's go over this one that might make us less money, but we can knock it out in five minutes. And so often we get distracted by how big the impact will be without going after the low-hanging fruit stuff. I had a franchisee at 1-800-GOT-JUNKED that always wanted the next big marketing idea. And I said, until you park your trucks in high visibility areas, I'm not telling you the next marketing idea.

Because the easiest way for you to do it is focus on the basic critical few things versus continuing me showing you the next impact or the next cool idea when you're not doing the stuff that, you know. So challenge your team to show you impact, but also the ROI and the inputs required to get to that ROI. And it'll help you make better decisions on what to do when. This is brilliant. I know we got to get going here. I got a couple of quick more questions. So let me ask you real quick. Why is it?

You know, private equity is such a big deal. I mean, these roll-ups and I'm watching them get crushed all over the place. They suck out the culture. And I was just at an LP meeting in Manhattan about four months ago. And there was five guys talking at the Cortec Limited Partner Meeting, 140 investors, five of the top PE companies and the way they're thinking now. And they said,

If it's not truly integrated and we've learned that lesson over the five years, we're going to really buy it at a much lower deal. And then they said, if the founder is not there anymore, it's not worth as much. It's just something about in-home service, at least from what I've seen, from what I've listened to,

Is that everyone talks about founder based companies that the founders still involved. Here's the key. The only way in this, you mentioned earlier, build to sell. You have to build a company that is so operationally excellent, that is devoid of the entrepreneur's brand that actually can build. So that's like, who the hell is the owner? Like, we don't really need the owner. The team runs everything. The team makes decisions. The team runs SOPs. The problem is that most founder run companies are built off of the cult of

the kind of cult of leadership, the person's name, they're on the billboards, they're on the whatever, but they haven't built the best company. The best company is going to sell not just based on the P&L and the book value, but also in the Rembrandts in the attic, right? All the other strategic things that add incremental value. As an example, if you and I were walking through Paradise Valley and we both saw a home and you said, I'll pay $5 million for that home. And I walk in and there's three other offers on the table for $5 million. And I come in and I say, I'm going to offer $7 million.

You're like, Cameron's an idiot. Why would he offer seven? It's clearly only worth 5 million. Because I'm not looking at the comps. I went up into the attic and saw two Rembrandt paintings that are each worth 2 million bucks. So I got a $5 million house and 4 million paintings. I'm taking the home with all the assets for 7 million bucks. I made two.

most people are trying to sell their company based on the P and L I'm trying to sell it based on the leadership team, based on the press that we're getting based on our SEO, based on the systems and processes that are documented based on the fact that I don't come to meetings. I took 11 weeks off for the last three years in a row and empowered a team and grew a team. But yeah, if I'm there every day and I'm in the media and I'm in the marketing and I'm in the messaging and I'm the rain maker and I'm making all the decisions, of course you need the founder. Well,

Well, Bill, to last, not Jack Worrello, that's Jim Collins. Jack Welch, I mean, he's very controversial where he'd get rid of 10% of the whole. Yeah. What do you think about Jack Welch as the leader? So I talked to Jeff Imelt, who is his successor. We were in a green room one time at a speaking event. It's like 12 years ago. And I asked him what was the system that he used that Jack Welch used. I liked a lot of Jack's stuff, but he's also very 1980s, very 1990s.

The thing that I like about him is he top grades his team every six months. He actually rates all of his employees on a scale of results and values. So I love that. That's not necessarily fire the bottom 10%. That's about firing people that are not living your company's core values. And most companies will, oh, he's my best salesperson. So I don't care if he breaks the core values. No, get rid of your best salesperson who breaks core values and everyone else will go through brick walls for you. So

So what Welch was good at was pushing to get people into the handcuff zone, high results, high core values, and then making sure people were in the right seats, very Jim Collins. But anybody who is not living the core values, regardless of results, they're fired. Those are the, those are like, I think that's, that's really good. Oh my gosh. I'm going to have to listen. This is the first podcast I've had. And I don't know how long that I got to relisten to. Um,

There's a lot of information here. Here's something else that Welch was great at. Jack Welch built Crotonville, which was the leadership development academy and center for all of the GE employees to go through all the Six Sigma and Lean. That ability to grow people's skills and capacities as a leader

was game-changing for GE globally. Most companies don't dumb that. So I launched a course called Invest in Your Leaders, which is the skills that every leader and manager needs to be good at. GE and Jack Welch built out probably the best leadership academy in the world. I'd say McDonald's was right up there. Xerox was right up there. And Starbucks was certainly right up there. But most small, medium-sized companies...

Yeah, enterprise is amazing. Enterprise also is amazing on culture. They hired the right culture people, and you could feel it every time you went into any enterprise location. When we were building Boyd Auto Body and Gerber Auto Collision, we partnered with enterprise because they were just so different. You went to Hertz or budget anybody else, you never knew what you were going to get. Enterprise still to this day is predictable. I'm blown away. I've got

Like, I kind of want to work with you on certain things, like in a big way. Is there any books that you just, I know the E-Myth, you know, When Friends Didn't Influence People, I know Napoleon Hill. Like, I could go through the ones that are just, you're a couple of them. Like, there's so many common books that I really like have read over and over again. But do you got any ones that are like, that probably aren't under the limelight? Under the limelight? Yeah.

I have a couple and I like that you said over and over again, because I think what we need to do is have like our 10 core books that we reread every couple of years. Like we should be rereading good to great every year or two.

We should be rereading Insanely Simple about Apple and Steve Jobs and the obsession around simplicity every year or two. We should be rereading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Pat Lencioni. The One Minute Manager, I mean, still to this day, it's such an easy two-hour read. It is game-changing when leaders and managers reread Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey's work from 50 years, 40 years ago. That stuff is, but we don't. We just, we kind of move on to the next thing.

Yeah, there was One Minute Manager Meets. There's so many of those books. Brian Davenport talks about it all the time.

It's solid. Well, how does somebody get a hold of you, Cameron? Yeah, my website is CameronHerolds.com and it's H-E-R-O-L-D. And then by the way, for anybody who's running companies with more than 5 million or greater in revenue, you get your COO into the COO Alliance. Like let me have my hands on them and work with them. I've got members of the COO Alliance from 17 countries, but all my books are on Amazon, Audible and iTunes. My podcast, The Second Command is on Apple. We're all out there.

And we had your CEO on the Second Command podcast too. We just did our 400th episode was two days ago. We had the Savannah Bananas CEO on our podcast. I love it. Yeah. Brilliant. You know, I'm not quite, I'm just shy of 400. Commitment, consistency, discipline. Those are like,

Man, I might have to revisit my core values. I hate to say it. Gina Wigman would kill me because they're not so. But anyway. If those are your core values, I'd kill you because you can never have a core value that's a single word. The only time I've ever let a client have a single word for one of their core values, their fifth core value is simplify. I'm like, ah, yes, you're right. That's perfect.

But core values have to be very easy to understand. They need no explanation whatsoever. And a single word is confusing. What exactly do we mean? So it's a very short, easy to understand phrase like thou shalt not kill. Right. We get it.

That's not commit adultery. I get it. So simple core values. And you don't get to say a bunch of prayers when you break the core values. You don't do your like, forgive me, father, for I have sinned. And here's some prayers. Go back and keep making the sins. No, you don't break core values. If you break core values, you go work somewhere else like the government or post office. You have to be willing to fire people who break your core values. And then you have to interview against them, hire people who already live them. I'm obsessed about core values in the company.

I love it. What didn't we hit that you want to close us out with? I'll go to kind of honor John Rulon, but it's also been my ending point for probably every media interview I've done for 20 years is that none of this shit matters. This is just what we do to make money. This is not our reason for being. And at the end of the day, none of us are getting out of this alive. So it's about...

hugging your loved ones and spending time with your friends and family and spending time with your hobbies and enjoying the journey at the same time that we build better companies, but care about your employees because nobody's caring about their humanity that they're going through. And if we care about our people more than anybody else does, they'll go through brick walls for us to build our company. I love this. Cameron, stay on for a moment. I appreciate you doing this. Okay, man, for sure.

Hey there, thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high

performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets that helped me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700 plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.